Mr. Barotia was talking to someone when he opened the
door. Speaking into the phone that he held in his left hand, he gave me his
right fist, which I couldn’t quite decide whether to touch or to hold. Mr.
Barotia said to the person on the phone, ‘Haan, haan, we
will sit down and talk about it.’

The apartment, with the sunlight falling on the bulky
white furniture, some of it covered with transparent plastic, appeared clean
and bright, especially after the darkness of the corridor outside with its
musty carpeting. I was happy that I had gotten so far. I had spoken to Mr.
Barotia for the first time only during the previous week. On the phone he
had called me a haraami, which means bastard in Hindi, and, after
clarifying that he didn’t mean this abuse only for me as a person but for
everyone else who was like me, he had also called me a kutta, a dog.

Although I had no idea of Jagdish Barotia’s identity
till recently, I had wanted to meet him for well over two years. I wanted to
meet face to face a man who thought I was his enemy, to see if I could
understand why he hated me so much, and why he hated other people who were
different from him. My name had appeared on a hit-list put on a website in
the year 2000. The website belongs to a group called Hindu Unity – none of
whose members, including Mr. Barotia, were named on the site – and it
presented links to other right-wing Hindu groups. My name was on a list of
individuals who were regarded as enemies of a Hindu India. There was special
anger for people like me, who were Hindus but, in the minds of the list’s
organizers, traitors to Hindutva, the ideology of a resurgent, anti-left,
ultranationalistic Hindu cause.

The summer after the site was established, The New
York Times carried a report on the alliance that Hindu Unity had formed
with Rabbi Meir Kahane’s group. This is how the article began: ‘A
website run by militant Hindus in Queens and Long Island was recently shut
down by its service provider because of complaints that it advocated hatred
and violence toward Muslims. But a few days later, the site was back on the
internet. The unlikely rescuers were some radical Jews in Brooklyn who are
under investigation for possible ties to anti-Arab terrorist organizations
in Israel.’ The Zionist organization as well as the Hindutva group had
come together in New York City against what they considered their common
enemy, Islam.

T

he
news story had mentioned that Hindu Unity was a secretive group. It had been
difficult for the reporter to meet the men who ran the website. I had sent
several e-mail messages to the address provided on the site – the address
where one was supposed to write and report the names of the enemies of the
Hindus – but no one had responded to my requests for an interview. Then,
while I was having lunch at an Indian restaurant with a leader of the
Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Mr. Barotia’s name came
up. The BJP is the right-wing Hindu party in power in Delhi; the Overseas
Friends is an umbrella organization of Hindu groups outside India, zealously
presenting to anyone who cares to listen the details of what they regard as
the menace of the minorities (that is, non-Hindus) in India. When I told the
man that I’d like to meet Mr. Barotia, he gave me his phone number and
just as casually, mentioned that Mr. Barotia had been instrumental in
establishing the website for Hindu Unity. (When I asked Mr. Barotia directly
about this, he said, via an e-mail message: ‘I am a supporter of Hindu
Unity and all the organizations which support the Hindu cause… I think
there is a difference between being a member and a supporter. I do not pay
any subscription for membership in Hindu Unity.’)

Half an hour later, I was on the phone with Mr. Barotia.
When I gave him my name, he recognized it, and his voice lost its warmth. He
told me that he had read an article of mine describing a visit to Pakistan,
and he asked me to confirm what he knew about me, that I had married a
Muslim. When I replied that I had, he said, ‘You have caused me a lot of
pain.’ I didn’t know what to say. It was then, after I told him I wanted
to meet him, that he called me a bastard and a dog. He also said that people
like me were not secular, we were actually confused. We would learn our
lesson, he said, when the Muslim population increased in India, and the
Muslims came after us and chopped our legs off.

I guess I could say that I felt his pain when he said
that he didn’t understand what had happened to the Hindu children, how it
had come to be that they were surrounded by so much darkness. I said to him
that I was not a child any more, but I sounded like one when I said that.
Mr. Barotia invited me to his home, saying that he was sure that after he
had talked to me and given me ‘all the facts’, I would change my mind
about Muslims. He was the secretary of an outfit which he called the
Indian-American Intellectuals Forum; he was also the organizing secretary of
the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the overseas wing of the RSS (Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Voluntary Organization), a militant group to
which the murderer of Mahatma Gandhi had once belonged. The internet was a
gift to Mr. Barotia’s propaganda. It made him a better long-distance
nationalist. He said to me, ‘If the Hindus will be saved, it will be
because of the internet. I send out an email and am able to talk at once to
5,000 Hindus.’ And so it was that less than a week later, I went to
Elmhurst, Queens, to meet Mr. Barotia.

I

n
the summer of 1999, when India and Pakistan were engaged in a conflict near
Kargil, in Kashmir, I had gotten married. In the days leading up to my
wedding, I often told myself that my marriage was unusually symbolic: I was
doing my bit to help bring peace to more than a billion people living in the
subcontinent because I am an Indian Hindu and the woman I was about to
marry, Mona, is a Pakistani Muslim.

The wedding took place in June, and it was hot when I
drove up to Toronto, where Mona’s parents had recently moved from Karachi.
Driving home alone (Mona had stayed behind with her family for a few days
because they were returning to Pakistan), past Niagara Falls, where I had
heard that honeymooners often go, I felt good about myself for marrying ‘the
enemy’. The thought gave me a small thrill. I began to compose in my mind
a brief newspaper editorial about how my marriage had opened a new track for
people-to-people diplomacy.

E

very
day in Toronto the news bulletins brought to us the war in Kashmir. But we
had other preoccupations. Along with Mona’s brothers and father, I would
wake up at five in the morning to watch India and Pakistan fighting it out
on the cricket fields in England, where the World Cup tournament was being
played. A day before our wedding, India beat Pakistan in the match in
Manchester. During that match, one lone spectator had held a sign, ‘Cricket
for Peace’. Watching the match on television, I wondered whether I too
could walk around with a placard hung from my neck, saying ‘Marriage for
Peace’.

The article I eventually wrote for an Indian newspaper
was what first brought me to Mr. Barotia’s attention. We became enemies.

At least, that is how he thinks of his relationship to
me. We hardly know each other. The issue is not personal; it is political.
After reading my articles about my marriage, and later, my visit to
Pakistan, Mr. Barotia denounced me as an enemy of India. I went to meet him
in his apartment in Queens because I wanted a dialogue with him. I also
wanted to see his face. I found the idea of a faceless enemy unbearable.
That wasn’t a psychological problem so much as a writer’s problem. I
wanted detail and voice. Mr. Barotia had said to me on the phone that the
Hindu rioters in Gujarat, who burnt, raped, or slaughtered more than a
thousand Muslims earlier that year had taught the Indian minorities a lesson
they would never forget. I wanted to meet Mr. Barotia so that I could ask
him about the process through which he had come to think of the Muslim as
the enemy. I did ask him, but his response revealed little to me that was
new.

Nevertheless, our meeting was a discovery because it made
me think not simply of our differences but also our similarities. What is it
that divides the writer from the rioter? The answer is not very clear or
simple. There could be more in common between the two than either might
imagine – a vast hinterland of cultural memory and shared prejudice, for
example. Was it an excess of sympathy on my part – or, on the contrary,
too little of it – that made it difficult, if not also impossible, for me
to draw a plainly legible line between a man in a mob and myself?

T

here
was a woman in the house, she was Mr. Barotia’s niece, and she called out
to him when she saw me enter the living room. He was being asked to put on a
shirt. Mr. Barotia was short and had a round face with grey eyebrows. He put
on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses after I told him that I doubted his
statement that we had met before. Mr. Barotia touched his glasses and
frowned. He said, ‘But your face looks familiar.’ I suddenly thought of
the Hindu Unity website, where my photograph had appeared, picked up from
the newspaper pieces. Perhaps that was the reason why Mr. Barotia thought
that he had seen me before. He had seen my face on the site’s so-called
black list, along with my name and address. But I couldn’t bring myself to
tell him that. Instead, I drank the tea that I was offered. And then, Mr.
Barotia began to tell me about what he called ‘the poison of Islam’.

T

he
litany of complaints was familiar and quickly wearying. Mr. Barotia began
with the names of all the male Indian film-stars who were Muslim and married
to Hindu women. ‘Sharmila Tagore is now Ayesha Begum and that pimp
Shahrukh Khan is married to a Hindu girl. Her name is Gauri.’ These women
had been forced to convert, he said, and now Muslims were having sex with
them, thereby defiling them. When Mr. Barotia told me this, he moved his
right forearm back and forth against his paunch in a pumping action. He was
using a vulgar Hindi word for what he was describing, a word common on the
streets in India, and he said it so loudly, and so repeatedly, that I was
startled and immediately thought of his niece in the kitchen. I was a
stranger and she had not come in front of me; it was Mr. Barotia who had to
get up and go to her to fetch the tray with tea and biscuits for us. Her
manner had suggested that there was a great deal of traditional reserve in
the household. What did she think of Mr. Barotia carrying on so obscenely
about circumcised cocks and f***ing?

The BJP leader in the Indian restaurant, when he had
given me Mr. Barotia’s phone number, had told me that Mr. Barotia’s
family had been massacred during the riots in 1947, during the partition of
India and Pakistan. I found out now that wasn’t true. Mr. Barotia said
that his family had left Sindh, in Pakistan, and crossed the border quite
safely more than a year after the partition. This revelation left me without
a convenient explanation for his bigotry. When I asked Mr. Barotia to tell
me about how he had come to acquire his well-defined worldview, he sputtered
with rage. ‘I was liberal like you, liberal like stupid, ignorant. In
Islam, there is no space for your secularism. There is no humanity in it.
They extol the virtue of violence, they want to kill infidels… Islam is
not a religion, it is a political ideology to capture land and rape women.’

I

had begun taking notes. Mr. Barotia would now and then point at my notebook
and say, ‘Write!’ and then he would say things like ‘Hindus were being
killed in Pakistan and Gandhi was giving speeches. Saala tum ghoomta hai
haraami… When Gandhi was killed, that day I felt relaxed.’ A little
later, a friend of Mr. Barotia’s joined us, a fat, bearded man with a red tilak
on his forehead. This man pedantically recited Sanskrit shlokas –
verses from the Vedas – when he made his polemical points, and I
sometimes turned back to Mr. Barotia’s plainer speech, and his abuses,
with a sense of relief.

Soon, it became clear that Mr. Barotia was going to buy
me lunch. We walked to an Indian diner about a ten minutes away, in Jackson
Heights. Mr. Barotia behaved like a friendly host, urging me to try the
different dishes, putting bits of warm nan on my plate. He also ate
with gusto, refilling his plate several times, and as I looked at him, his
shirt front flecked with the food he had dropped there, I saw him as a
contented, slightly tired old man who was perhaps getting ready to take an
afternoon nap. Earlier, Mr. Barotia had told me that because the Hindus had
killed so many Muslims earlier that year in Gujarat, a change had come
about. ‘We have created fear,’ he boasted. ‘Yeh garmi jo hai, main
India mein phaila doonga. This heat that is there, I will spread it in
India. And those who write against us, their fingers will be cut.’ But,
for now, he was quietly stuffing pakoras into his mouth: a retired
immigrant worker eating in a cheap immigrant restaurant.

Mr. Barotia had told me earlier that day that he had come
to the United States in 1972. For twenty-five years he had worked as a legal
secretary in Manhattan – the BJP man in the restaurant the previous week
had told me that Mr. Barotia had been ‘a typist’, and I had seen from
the gesture of his hand that he was being dismissive. Mr. Barotia said that
he had gotten along well with his colleagues at work and they treated him as
‘a partner in the firm’, and one of them had even called him after the
attacks of September 11 to say, ‘Jagdish, we thought you were obsessed
with Muslims. But you were right.’

A

fter
our lunch, one other matter of business remained. Mr. Barotia was going to
give me newspaper-cuttings and booklets. We walked back to his apartment
through the crowded streets of Jackson Heights. The exercise brought Mr.
Barotia back to life. His home is in a locality where Indians and Pakistanis
immigrants live together; Elmhurst is said to be the most diverse zip-code
area in the whole of United States. When I asked Mr. Barotia about his
experience of living in this part of the city, he looked at the Muslims
milling around us, the men with beards and caps, women with headscarves, and
he spat out abuse. They harass our women, he said, and there is a lot of
tension here. Then, suddenly, he began to talk of my wife whom he has never
met. We were passing in front of the Indian grocery and jewellery stores,
and Mr. Barotia turned to me and said, ‘It is okay. You f*** her. And you
tell everyone that she is Muslim, and that you keep f***ing her! And through
her, you keep f***ing Islam!’

‘What did you do when he said that?’ This is what
Mona, my wife, asked me when she heard the story. I had called her from a
public phone near Mr. Barotia’s apartment. Above me was a large sign with
black letters painted on a white board, LEARN ENGLISH APRENDA INGLES. There
was a pause before I replied to the question. I told Mona that I had done
nothing. Wordlessly, I had kept walking beside Mr. Barotia. It would have
been more accurate to say that I had made a mental note of what he had said.
I said to myself that I needed to write down his words in my notebook as
soon as I was back on the train. And that is what I did. Sitting in the
train, with three men on the seat opposite me, each one of them wearing
identical yellow jerseys and holding aluminium crutches against their knees,
I took down notes about what Mr. Barotia had said during our walk back from
the lunch. The strange thing is, although perhaps it is not strange at all,
that later Mr. Barotia’s words crossed my mind, just when my wife and I
had finished having breakfast in our kitchen and there, next to the sink
with the empty bowl of cereals, I had begun to kiss her.

D

uring
lunch, Mr. Barotia had told me that I was ungrateful if I forgot how Hindu
warriors had saved our motherland. He must have gotten to me because when he
asked me why I believed in coexistence with Muslims, I said a phrase in
Hindi that essentially meant ‘We are Nehru’s bastards’. It was an
admission of guilt, of illegitimacy, as if Nehru, the socialist first prime
minister of India, had done something wrong in being a liberal, and those of
us who believed in his vision of an inclusive India were his ill-begotten
offspring. Nehru is often accused by his detractors of having been a
profligate person, and my remark had granted him a certain promiscuity. But
the more serious charge hidden in my comment was that the former prime
minister had produced a polity that was the result of miscegenation with the
West.

I

was being disingenuous – and so was Mr. Barotia. Our lives and our
histories, with or without Nehru, were tied up with links with the wider
world. I am an Indian writer who writes in English. Mr. Barotia’s parent
party, the RSS, had been inspired by the Nazis and revered a German man,
Hitler. Today, Mr. Barotia is a fan of the internet. We both live and work
in the United States. We are both struggling, each in our way, to be like
Nehru, whose eclecticism was exceptional. But Nehru was also exemplary
because, unlike many of his Hindu compatriots, he had an unwavering belief
that Hindu-Muslim conflict had nothing to do with tradition but was a modern
phenomenon, which could be corrected by means of enlightened policy.

In the train, flipping over some of the papers that Mr.
Barotia had given me, I began to read what the Hindutva brigade had to say
about Nehru. An article provided ‘circumstantial evidence’ that Nehru
was a Muslim. One item of proof offered was the following: ‘He had
"Muslim" morals while "chasing and pursuing" a married
woman (Edwina Mountbatten) and professing love to her. If he were a Hindu he
would have respected married women and looked at the unmarried girls as
"devis" (goddesses).’ Another piece, this one about Gandhi who
had preached love among different religions, began by asserting that there
are two kinds of bastards: those who are ‘born of illicit sex’ and those
who are ‘despicable in word and conduct’. ‘The remarkable thing about
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi,’ the writer said, ‘is that he was a bastard
on both counts.’

Mr. Barotia had given me a set of typewritten sheets
collected under the title ‘Wake Up! America! Wake Up!’ These pages, each
one carrying exhortations printed in emphatic bold letters and followed by a
series of mercilessly underlined sentences, were his response to the tragedy
of September 11. (‘The macabre massacre of around 15,000 people (mostly
Disbelievers) in less than 120 minutes. The inciter, the instigator QURAN is
the CRIMINAL CULPRIT, which incites millions of Muslims around the World to
the ghastly, ghostly crimes of this enormous destructive nature on the
Disbelievers; and UNASHAMEDLY at the same time, tells these are all HOLY!
So, Oh Disbeliever World! UNDERSTAND THIS COLD, CHILLING TRUTH.’)

A

s
I read the following words, it was as if I could hear Mr. Barotia’s
hectoring voice. His interest in alliteration had not been evident to me
before, but it didn’t distract me from his real interest in producing a
phony history and linking it to language. ‘As the history of Mohammed
goes, he was a serial rapist, a serial murderer, a chronic criminal, a
treacherous terrorist who was banished by his family and the society of his
times,’ Mr. Barotia wrote. He followed a little later with a bogus
disquisition on the etymology of the name for Muslims. The Prophet, in order
to avenge the lack of respect shown him, founded ‘gangs of powerful youth
(Muscle Men), offering them girls of their choice, food and wine.’ And,
‘the illiterate Mohammed mispronounced the word "Muscle Man" as
"Musalman".’ Over a period of time, this mispronunciation became
an accepted pronunciation!" The ten-page text ended with a question not
about September 11 but an earlier unresolved crime that is still an
obsession for many conspiracy-theorists in America and to which Mr. Barotia
was only giving a new twist: ‘Who was behind the planning, plotting and
planting the Death of the Dearest JFK?’ The answer: ‘It was ISLAM, ISLAM
and ISLAM, the ever valiant villain.’

T

here
are various things that could be said about Mr. Barotia. One would be that
he is a fringe element that gives a dangerous edge to an increasingly
powerful and mainstream ideology in the subcontinent. His political
affiliation is with the party that rules now in New Delhi, although it is in
retreat in parts of India. Mr. Barotia is also a member of the group that
claims success in raising funds in the West – including investments made
by expatriate Indians, allegedly to the tune of four billion dollars – to
support the Indian government after economic sanctions had been imposed on
India following the nuclear tests in 1998.

But, what interests me, as a writer, are the words that
Mr. Barotia uses. Their violence and ferocity – their absoluteness
compromised and made vulnerable in different ways, not least by the repeated
eruption of a sexual anxiety – carry the threat most visible in the
rhetoric of rioters in India today. That rhetoric leaves no place for the
middle-class gentility of Nehruvian liberalism. Indeed, its incivility is a
response to the failures of the idealism represented by the likes of Nehru
and Gandhi. Mr. Barotia’s voice is the voice of the lumpen that knows it
is lumpen no longer. It almost has the legitimacy of being the voice of the
people, which it is not, and its aggressiveness is born through its own
sense that it is pitched in battle against those who held power for too
long.

I am not sure whether I would ever, or for long, envy Mr.
Barotia’s passion, but I find myself sympathetic to his perception that
the English-speaking elite of India has not granted the likes of him a
proper place under the Indian flag. Once that thought enters my head, I am
uneasily conscious of the ways in which I found myself mocking Mr. Barotia’s
bigotry by noticing his ungrammatical English. Like Mr. Barotia, I was born
in the provinces and grew up in small towns. For me, the move to the city
meant that I learnt English and embraced secular, universal rationality and
liberalism. Mr. Barotia remained truer to his roots and retained his
religion as well as a narrower form of nationalism that went with it. His
revenge on the city was that he also became a fanatic. I do not envy him his
changes, but I can’t think of those changes without a small degree of
tenderness.

T

here
is also another reason why Mr. Barotia’s words hold my attention. His
stories about heroism and betrayal share something with the fantasy-world of
my own childhood, whose half-understood atmosphere of rumour and prejudice
was a part not of a private universe but a largely public one. What Mr.
Barotia and I share in some deep way is the language of memory – that well
from which we have drawn, like water, our collective stories. After my
meeting with Mr. Barotia, I thought of a particular incident from my
childhood and wondered whether he, too, had similar memories, linking him
and me, all of us, to all the bigots of the world.

My memory concerned a dead lizard. I must have been five
or six at that time. The lizards, the girgit, were everywhere. In the
small garden outside our home in Patna, they would creep out of the hedge
and sun themselves on the metal gate. (Many years later, in a mall near
Washington, I saw the lizards being sold as pets, and was reminded of my
childhood fear of them.) These lizards were yellow or brown, their thin
bodies scaly, and many of them had bloated red sacs under their chins.
Although I was scared of the lizards, I also wanted to kill them. I often
daydreamed about killing one by throwing a stone at it when it wasn’t
looking. I would try to imagine what its pale exposed belly would look like
when it fell through the air, from the gate to the ground.

A boy who was a year ahead of me in school actually
killed one of them, bringing it to me a plastic bag. It was he who told me
that the lizards were Muslim. He pointed out the sacs under their chins and
said that they used to be beards. Here is the story he told:

During the riots that accompanied the partition of India
in 1947, the Muslims were running scared of the Hindus. If the Hindus found
the Muslims, they would murder them. If the Hindus did not kill the Muslims
first, the Muslims would instead butcher the Hindus with their swords. Or
they would take the Hindus to the new country, Pakistan, where the Hindus
would be converted and become trapped forever. One day, the Hindus saw a
bearded Muslim running away. They caught him and were about to chop off his
head. The man was a coward. In order to save his life, he pointed with his
beard toward the well where the other Muslims were hiding. Because of this
act of treachery, that man was turned into a lizard with a sac under his
chin. That is why when we Hindus looked at these lizards, they bob their
heads as if they are pointing toward a well.